The New York Mayor's Race Sucks
I will vote first for Whitney Tilson, who has no chance of winning; everyone else in the field is so bad that Andrew Cuomo is the least-bad option among them.
Dear readers,
Four years ago, New York City Democrats held a ranked-choice primary for the election to succeed Mayor Bill de Blasio, and everyone knows the winner was Eric Adams, a moderate with no real administrative experience and a casual attitude about compliance with the law.
What a lot of people have forgotten about that primary is that Adams won very narrowly. In the last round of ranked choice calculations, he won 50.4% of votes to 49.6% for former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia. Garcia and Adams had very different profiles and very different voter bases: Garcia’s reputation as an excellent administrator earned her the endorsement of The New York Times (as well as my own personal vote), and she ran very strongly in affluent areas of Manhattan and inner Brooklyn; Adams, meanwhile, was a favorite of outer-borough machine politicians and he dominated in the middle-class black neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens. But their politics and platforms were not so different. Garcia, like Adams, was a moderate, and before she became a leading candidate in the race, Garcia was often discussed as a potential deputy mayor to Adams, if he were to win. The fourth-place candidate, Andrew Yang, was a moderate, too.
In the ensuing four years, the national “vibe shift” has pushed big-city politics to the right. You would think this year’s Democratic mayoral primary, also using ranked choice, would be even more favorable ground for moderate candidates than the last one. But there’s a problem: This time, nobody quite like Garcia is running, which means a lot of voters, including me, are pretty annoyed by this field.
Indeed, in this year’s nine-candidate field, there’s only one candidate who even says he voted for Garcia. That’s Whitney Tilson, a former hedge fund manager who helped to found Teach for America, and who has sensible, Garcia-like ideas about how he’d run the city. Tilson has earned my first-place vote. But he has not caught traction, and I understand why “very wealthy hedge fund guy” is a less-appealing candidate summary than “sanitation commissioner” for the average Democratic primary voter.
I hoped Garcia herself would run again, but she took a job as a top aide to Gov. Kathy Hochul shortly after the 2021 election and appears to be content to stay in a non-elected role. I also hoped police commissioner Jessica Tisch might run, as the New York Post editorial board urged her to do. Tisch and Garcia have similar résumés — the former was sanitation commissioner after the latter and was also considered to be very good at it — and Tisch has the added bonus of being an heir to a vast fortune that she could draw on to mount a political campaign. I think it’s likely Tisch will run for mayor someday, but for this cycle, she has decided to stay put in the police commissioner job that she started just a few months ago.
Instead, the centrist behemoth in this primary election field is disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo.
There are several problems with Cuomo, starting with the allegations about his personal behavior that were serious enough to drive him out of Albany just a few years ago. Even if you don’t credit the accounts of the several women who accused him of sexual harassment, other facts that came out in the stories about the accusations were themselves quite damning about his judgment. For example, directing your staff to find a job in your office for an event waitress because you find her attractive is the wrong way to do hiring even if your subsequent conduct toward your new employee, while somewhat odd, never rises to the level of sexual harassment.
I also just don’t think Cuomo was a very good governor, especially in his later years in office. He fixated on vanity projects — for example, directing the MTA to spend an extra $30 million to retile its road tunnels in colors that matched the state seal, and telling the Port Authority to build a LaGuardia AirTrain that would have run backwards, away from Manhattan and toward a lightly-served Long Island Railroad station near Citi Field. (One of the best things about Cuomo’s resignation is that this wasteful pet project was swiftly canceled once he was no longer around to insist upon it.) And he gave too much away to the left, signing laws that he now acknowledges were unwise, including a strengthening of rent stabilization laws that have made it uneconomical for landlords to maintain and upgrade much of New York City’s housing stock, and a bail reform law that made it too difficult to detain dangerous accused criminals before trial.
I’ve written about how union demands drive up the cost of government in New York and make it inordinately difficult for our elected officials to deliver cost-effective projects. If Cuomo is elected, he will come in as the preferred candidate of organized labor, and he will owe favors to many of the unions that have backed him, including the construction trades and the hotel workers. This does not make me optimistic about his prospects for making New York more abundant.
And yet I’m going to rank Cuomo such that my vote ultimately accrues to him, because all the other options (besides Tilson) are too left-wing.
Despite the dominance of the moderate candidates four years ago, everyone else in this year’s field has chosen to run to Cuomo’s left, and in addition to leaving me without appealing options, that choice has left most of them unable to effectively distinguish themselves from each other. The exception to that is Zohran Mamdani, a charismatic 33-year-old socialist state assemblyman who supports much higher taxes, a soft-on-crime approach to policing, dumb initiatives like city-run grocery stores, and rent controls on all newly-constructed apartment buildings. This last policy is particularly important to note: Mamdani has been mouthing the right words about the importance of upzoning and private development, but he intends to saddle developers with costly rules that would stifle construction even if the city did aggressively upzone. His ideas are just bad, bad, bad. If the choice is between him and Cuomo — and the polling makes clear that it will be — then I am going to pick Cuomo every time.
If there were anyone other than Tilson in this field who I thought would be a genuinely good mayor, I would be distraught about the potential outcome Joel Wertheimer describes in a guest post at Silver Bulletin: The primary electorate is coalescing around Cuomo and Mamdani, and thereby squeezing out the candidates who sit between them ideologically, even though a majority of primary voters might prefer one of those candidates over both Cuomo and Mamdani in head-to-head matchups. Wertheimer argues that City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams might be positioned to do that, if she were not instead destined to be eliminated in the ranked-choice calculations with fewer votes than either.
That could be right — though as Wertheimer himself notes, the polling evidence is limited, and it might also be the case that Cuomo would simply be strong enough to beat any candidate, including Adrienne Adams, in a head-to-head race. But as far as I’m concerned, Adrienne Adams is just another replacement-level, too-left New York politician — she might run the city better than Cuomo would, but she also might not. She’s no Kathryn Garcia.
The last thing I’d note about this depressing election is that it won’t necessarily be over after the Democratic primary, despite the city’s heavily Democratic nature. We may even be heading for a five-way general election.
Incumbent mayor Eric Adams dropped out of the Democratic primary a few months back, but he intends to seek re-election as an independent on the general election ballot. He’s been running a pretty lackadaisical public campaign to date, but The New York Times reports that he’s been working to block Cuomo’s momentum with Jewish voters in the primary, apparently because he believes he could win the general election if Mamdani is the Democratic nominee. Cuomo has also secured a pathway to the general election if he loses the Democratic primary: the “Fight & Deliver” party ballot line.1 Mamdani might also take a similar path — the Working Families Party could choose to make him their candidate in the general election. And Curtis Sliwa, the radio personality and gadfly who founded the Guardian Angels, will be the Republican nominee, as he was in 2021. Jim Walden, a moderate former assistant U.S. attorney, will also be on the general election ballot as an independent.
If Cuomo is the Democratic nominee, the general election will be pretty anti-climactic — I expect he will win easily. But if Mamdani wins, all hell may break loose. Eric Adams would position himself as the only candidate who can block a socialist takeover of New York, and will try to build a coalition based on black and Jewish voters — and Cuomo might yet contest the general election with essentially the same pitch. Walden, who has had a low profile to date, would likely get a hard look from voters in the Garcia coalition who consider Mamdani too extreme, Adams too corrupt, and Sliwa too silly. And Sliwa, who got 28% of the vote in the last general election, would get himself in the mix, too.
So buckle in, but don’t expect to enjoy yourself.
Very seriously,
Josh
This is a party that Cuomo created for himself — echoes of the time he created a “Women’s Equality Party” in an apparent effort to confuse voters out of voting for candidates on the Working Families Party line.
What about Myrie? From what I’ve read YIMBYs like what he’s pushing for on housing.
Agree with this analysis Josh, although “Hold Your Nose and Vote for Cuomo” is a terrible bumper sticker.